World1 min(s) read
Published 16:59 16 Aug 2020 GMT
Weighing yourself can be a distressing experience, and repeat weighings, while necessary in some cases, can be triggering.
This is why a restaurant in China has been forced to apologize after asking diners to weigh themselves before ordering after a national campaign to reduce food waste was introduced.
President Xi Jinping described the levels of waste in the country as "shocking and distressing", Bloomberg reports, and in a bid to cut this waste down, the Wuhan Catering Industry Association introduced a system where restaurants would serve one fewer dish than the number of diners.
However, one beef restaurant decided to take its bid to reduce food waste a step further than most and weighed its customers on entry before entering the data into an app that would suggest the most suitable meals for their size.
In addition to this, the restaurant had put up signs that read "be thrifty and diligent, promote empty plates" and "operation empty plate", the Daily Mail reports.
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For obvious reasons, the restaurant's decision to weigh its customers was slammed online, with the BBC reporting that hashtags about the incident have been viewed over 300 million times on the social media platform Weibo.
The beef restaurant has since responded to the criticism, apologizing for the upset and explaining that the weighing system was optional and that it was simply their way of taking part in the Clean Plate Campaign.
The apology, posted online, continued: "Our original intentions were to advocate stopping waste and ordering food in a healthy way. We never forced customers to weigh themselves."
Restaurant waste is not the only thing that has been targetted by the Chinese government in a bid to reduce food waste. They have also slammed "mukbang" aka viral binge-eating videos.
The president said that he decided to take action because COVID-19 "sounded the alarm" about the problem and the pandemic, coupled with weeks of mass flooding, have resulted in an increase in food prices.
President Jinping said China has to now "maintain a sense of crisis about food security", the BBC reports.
